Massive supply gap in hiring Data Science talent in India: Study

New Delhi, Oct 19 : The Data Science industry is witnessing a massive supply gap when it comes to talent, with 92 per cent of hiring managers have faced the shortfall, finds a study on the hiring trends.

The study conducted by Great Learning, an ed-tech company, puts the spotlight on hiring trends in the Data Science space, growing demand for Data Science professionals and the skills gap in the industry.

The biggest skills lacuna was identified in the area of Natural Language Processing (NLP) by 15 per cent of the hiring managers followed by Artificial Intelligence (12 per cent), automation (11 per cent), Computer Vision (10 per cent), analytics (9 per cent) and Machine Learning (7 per cent).

A little over half of the surveyed hiring managers represented B2B enterprises, about one-fourth represented B2C companies and the rest included Government and others. Industry sectors like BFSI had the maximum representation (21 per cent) followed by IT/ITES, Retail, E-commerce, Telecom, Engineering and Manufacturing.

About 57 per cent believed that the gap between supply and demand exists at the entry Level/fresher level while 27 per cent of the hiring managers believe that the talent gap exists in the mid-level roles of team lead and project management, highlighting the need to upskill both early-stage and mid-career professionals with enterprise-specific use cases of Data Science.

The study also finds that the lack of gender parity is an issue in the Data Science domain like it is with the broader tech domain.

Bengaluru (54 per cent) once again emerged as the leading city for hiring talent in Data Science, followed by Hyderabad 15 per cent.

The BPO and KPO hubs of Delhi NCR and Pune were preferred by 9 per cent and 6 per cent, respectively, followed by Mumbai and Chennai, which were preferred by 5 per cent each.

"The purpose of this study was to bring to light the key trends in the Data Science space that can help budding professionals plan their career path in line with the industry requirements and focus on the steps taken by organisations to address the underlying talent gap," said Hari Krishnan Nair, Co-Founder, Great Learning, in a statement.

"With every industry undergoing digital transformation, the demand for Data Science functions like NLP, AIML, big data, and automation are at an all-time high. The need of the hour is to raise our education standards and upskill our workforce to grab these new opportunities," he added.